


burning sacramento

by josiebelladonna, nirvhannahcornell (josiebelladonna)



Series: at land's end [2]
Category: Anthrax (US Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Body Horror, California, Chekhov's Guns, Fridge Horror, Gallows Humor, Gen, Gothic, Halloween, Hannibal Lecter References, Horror, Inspired by Frankenstein, Joey & the girl if you squint, Mountains, Near Death Experiences, Northern California, Scary Stories, Sewing, new kind of monster y'all
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-07
Updated: 2020-10-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:27:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26867368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/josiebelladonna/pseuds/josiebelladonna, https://archiveofourown.org/users/josiebelladonna/pseuds/nirvhannahcornell
Summary: following the california fires, she had befriended them in her art gallery and was kind enough to invite them to an event with her best friends. it all seems so unlikely for all to go wrong and to happen but... it happens.happy halloween!
Series: at land's end [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1842376





	burning sacramento

**Author's Note:**

> giving krista her day in the sun here, seeing as i'm the artist i am now because of the two of them. 💜  
> i'm also making this part of my at land's end series given it fits the mood (and to an extent, canon) of it; i'll be writing another halloween story so my former trilogy will be a heptalogy lol
> 
> this one's inspired by three things:  
> -an actual memory of me being about 13/14 and travelling with one of my aunts and my grandmother over labor day weekend to norcal to watch a big play my aunt was part of, in the little village of murphy's (back in c. 2007, which was the first of awful fire years for california - it was like every time you turned around, there was a fire somewhere).  
> -a dream i had involving me, joey, and krista somewhere and we were looking for something in a cabinet.  
> -and all the memories i have being a little girl in carson city at the turn of the millennium and hearing all manner of ghost stories in the real old part of town: all of these quaint, unassuming houses from the turn of the century and you would never guess they would be hiding something sinister because it was all so warm and welcoming, even this time of year (nevada became a state on halloween, so i remember the whole place lighting up on the 31st in celebration).  
> another inspiration, seeing as i mentioned "canon", is maya from amped and wired, and her patchwork creation: think the spawn of frankenstein, sally the rag doll, pinocchio, and hannibal lecter.
> 
> enjoy, and read this in a well-lit room for full effect! 🌹🎃💀
> 
>  _"everyone living in ghost town,  
>  everyone buried in waste land.  
> we don't want to,  
> we don't have to be like that...!"_  
> -"ghost town", shiny toy guns

Jill had met him when he and his band toured in Northern California sometime following the release of their album _For All Kings_ —she had fallen in love with his powerful voice. She was drawn to the whole band, for sure, but she kept returning to him like a magnet on cold iron. She never took that album out of her car stereo even as she was told to leave her home to avoid the flames, the first time from the Camp Fire and then again from the August Complex, the latter of which erupted when she had moved into her new apartment. Given her circumstances, she decided to move back in with her parents right outside of Sacramento as she started her own gallery on the eastern side. Every so often, she received a memory of both massive raging fires, but the memories had nothing on the power of her ink pens and her watercolor paints.

She knew what it was like to lose everything again and again, and yet Joey's voice gave her the strength to continue. Every glimpse into those brown eyes proved to be a glimpse into herself. Even though she knew he had his heart elsewhere, she still couldn't help but fall madly in love with the mysterious man from upstate New York, with all of his long beautiful flyaway curls and elegant slender body, even as a man summitting towards old age. You would never guess he was as old as he was, even with the pandemic having ended the whole world into complete oblivion, and especially the day he and Krista strolled into her gallery one day. They both gazed on at her drawings from the street and had come to the consensus to get to the artist a little better, to figure out the woman behind the name of Jillian Bones.

That was her actual given name.

“No bones about it”, as he joked to her. His sun kissed skin made her think of the barren earth on either side of the northern end of the Valley, but like with all ashes, there came forth a new sort of bare beauty to it. A new evergreen tree could sprout from a split pine cone courtesy of hot bright yellow flames in a similar manner his skin maintained such a lovely smoothness to it after years and years of touring about in the bitter, biting East Coast cold. The same could be said for Krista, with her golden blonde 'do and prominent dark roots, like the first beginnings of a sunflower as it rose out of the scorched earth.

Jill on the other hand had her sparse but lengthy black hair down to her thick waist, which stunned the both of them when they first met.

“Great artist and long hair,” he remarked with a lopsided grin and that accent utterly unmistakable, “I want you do Krista an' I a favor an' keep it that way.”

“We couldn't ask for anything more,” she added with the warmest, sweetest grin Jill had ever seen.

Even though Anthrax's show was that night there in Sacramento, and beginning in about two hours, which meant they both had to be there with haste, the two of them lingered there in the gallery and thus formed the first sparks of a friendship with the young artist, complete with an exchange of phone numbers and email addresses.

Once the three of them had left the gallery to attend the show, Jill sent a message to her two best friends what had happened. She was so eager to tell Elizabeth and Ellen that she had befriended the frontman of Anthrax and his wife in a matter of several minutes that she nearly dropped her phone on the floor between her legs. But she managed to tell them, and once she arrived at the venue, she found they had replied in rather quick fashion and wanted to know everything. Laughing, Jill vowed to save the details for later once she left the show.

“That's the best news to happen after all that had happened,” was the last thing Elizabeth had mentioned before Jill put her phone away in her purse. She gazed at the screen and thought about their dear departed triplet sister Elise, who had died shortly after the Camp Fire took place from complications from diabetes. It was in fact, the best news to come out of anywhere in such a long time that it coaxed a genuine smile out of Jill. Perhaps things were in fact looking up as she locked the car and followed Joey and Krista into the backstage area to meet everyone before the show and before she scouted out her place in the audience.

With her ears ringing and her eyes alight from the sheer sights before her, it was quite the catharsis to be a part of something that hadn't happened in what felt like a thousand years. She checked the screen on her phone again to find a message from Ellen begging for details.

She would then find herself caught in a mosh of communication between her two old friends and her two new friends for what felt to be several days. Joey and Krista had returned to upstate New York following Anthrax's stops in the Bay Area and then Los Angeles, and Jill found herself wanting to visit them, given it was safe enough to travel without the worry of a deadly cough on the back of her neck looming over her. She knew she had to work around her own schedule plus Joey's touring of his own with Chief Big Way and Journey Beyond.

“The man is an absolute work horse,” she told Ellen at one point during a lunch break; she took out the picks from Frank and Scott from her jeans pocket and smiled. Charlie was also kind enough to give her a packet of his fresh brewed coffee. “He told me—jokingly, anyways—that he's found the key to immortality: just keep going and keep moving about as much as you possibly can until you can't.”

“Fight 'em 'til you can't,” Ellen retorted.

“Exactly!”

That was also the same day Ellen told her about a big play she and Elizabeth were partaking in over the autumnal equinox down in the cute, quiet little alpine village of Murphy's, not too far from Sacramento.

“It was a play that one of our classmates wrote in Elise's honor,” she added. “Let's just say it's a catharsis for the both of us. It's over the course of a weekend.”

“Do you think I should invite Joey and Krista to come on out?” Jill asked her. “I'm finally making good money here in the gallery that I can get them a nice little room there in Murphy's.”

“If you want. We'll give the two of them—and you, too!—the star treatment if you don't mind.”

“The two of them deserve the best star treatment the Sacramento drama school can provide,” Jill told her with a run of her tongue along the top of her lip. She was eager to see Joey again, especially given the fact he never took his eyes off of her. The man was thirty years her senior, and yet he proved it all to be an illusion. Young, spry, and handsome, beautiful in fact, and elegantly slimming down with age, as if he aged in reverse. There was a point he hugged her and he held her next to him for something like twenty minutes. A thought lingered in her mind during those twenty minutes where she wanted to run her fingers down his toned chest.

His voice had filled out and developed this lush yet crisp timbre with time for some added strength, and to the point where if she listened long enough, she found her pelvic floor tingling. Lush but crisp and colorful, like the mountains of Northern California in late summer. She imagined him singing “Happy Birthday” to her with those lower rich notes and touching her breasts in the meantime with those big shapely Italian hands. An older gentleman as young as the springtime and defied all odds, much like Jill herself in the face of two gargantuan wildfires that burned whole towns to the ground.

Given the play was a month away, she placed the reservations at the little bed and breakfast there in the village after she got off the phone with Krista. She was quick to tuck a couple of large blankets into the back of her car because she knew those nights would be cold, much colder than upstate New York itself. To ensure their reservation was in place, she made the trip down to the village.

Even though she was driving through the Central Valley, a cool crisp thin blanket of marine layer entered into the Sacramento section to give the inland a feeling of the coastline. Outside of her windows beheld the low marsh lands complete with the tulare plants and small fledgling trees. She knew that Wine Country, which was not too far from there, following the sheer storm of fires, would still have to rebuild with all of those same type of plants plus brand new vineyards. At one point in her venture into the mountains, the clouds broke and the sun bathed over the bare earth and the forested foothills. All the colors warmed up and yet also washed out with each passing mile given the clouds burned away with the burgeoning warmth. To think all of that went on for hundreds of miles, all the way down the spine of California and towards the meeting of the San Andreas and the Garlock Faults.

On the way back, the clouds returned and she spotted Elizabeth had sent her a message at some point.

“I'm so excited to meet them,” she confessed.

Ellen and Elizabeth Bachara were two of surviving nearly identical blonde triplets attending the drama school there in Sacramento: two sisters who lived on after Elise, the third member of their party, had succumbed to diabetes. Neither of them developed it, but they watched their sister rocket into the horror of it all. She finally passed from an aggressive cancer on her poor pancreas: she was found on her bedroom floor with blood running from underneath her shirt and over her swollen belly. They could only assume that it metastatized all over her body, including her skin. The three of them oversaw her cremation, but Ellen and Elizabeth kept her ashes in a single urn on the mantel piece in the latter's apartment.

“We're not separating her ashes,” she vowed with a literal setting down of her foot on the hard apartment floor. “No way that is gonna happen.”

Elizabeth also told Jill that she was bringing the urn along to every play so they could literally pass off as triplets, and prove to be a release for the both of them. Jill knew she would have quite the story to tell to Joey and Krista once they met each other: two triplets with a phantom limb inside of a little coffee colored ceramic urn the size of a block of cheese.

That Friday of that big three day weekend, the two of them flew into Sacramento from Syracuse in the early hours of the morning. That dense fog from the Bay Area had made its way into the still parched Sacramento section of the Central Valley; Jill still pictured that orange tone to the clouds every so often, especially that time of year. Orange with sickness brought on by the inferno and the time she believed she couldn't breathe ever again.

She awaited them there at the terminal, wrapped in a little black windbreaker and with a black beret atop her coarse dark hair and her purse slung over her shoulder. She hoped Joey would recognize her full figure and her dark hair even covered up and obscured from the marine layer, and she had her worries given their flight had arrived five minutes early and she hadn't seen them. She glanced about the place for them, but only saw a series of unfamiliar faces around her. She started to wonder what happened to them as she took her phone out of her pocket for a new message to Ellen.

“No bones about it!”

She knew that upstate accent anywhere. She whirled around to see the two of them strolling up the narrow walkway next to one another, both of them wrapped up in black windbreakers themselves: Joey was unmistakable with that long wiry jet black hair down to his svelte waist, while she recognized Krista's crown of dark roots as they shone underneath the cold white lights of the terminal ceiling.

“I was wondering where the two of you had run off to,” Jill confessed to them.

“We were runnin' in circles,” Joey cracked to her, to which the three of them burst out laughing.

“So are you driving or should Joey or I do the chauffeuring?” Krista offered.

“I'll drive you guys,” said Jill as she adjusted her beret; Joey eyed that little beret and showed her a lopsided little smile in the meantime. “It's not far, but I know the way.” As the three of them headed out of the airport to her car: even with the marine layer looming over their heads, Jill wondered if it would rain there in the Valley. She hoped the show would go on in the dark forested mountains as the three of them drove out of Sacramento. Krista huddled down in the passenger seat next to Jill and rubbed the sides of her face with her gloved hands. Jill noticed the hair at the back of her head hanging away from her neck, as if she had put a bunch of hairspray back there, and yet she lacked that bold odor in favor of a softer, sweeter perfume.

“So much colder here, my goodness,” she muttered.

“Yeah, when we were comin' in, we felt it comin' down on us even in the plane,” Joey added with a soft groan in his throat as he got comfortable there by his lonesome in the backseat. Every so often on the ride up the hill, Jill took a glimpse in the rear view mirror at Joey lounging there in the back with his arms atop the seats. She noticed he had unbuttoned the collar of his shirt to show off some of his chest. She nibbled on her bottom lip at the sight of him.

Old but young. Aging but in reverse and as radiant as ever. Meanwhile, there was Krista with her colorful hair and skin like alabaster even with her age as well. Both of them thin and lovely despite the odds. Jill adjusted her fingers on the rim of the steering wheel given she was in the same car as them, and for about an hour until they reached the outskirts of the village.

Lucky for them, the marine layer had stopped at the rim of the Valley, which in turn left the mountains to stand out in the cold late summer sun. Joey peered out the window to his left at the gray and white clouds disappearing from around those dense dark green ponderosa pines.

“Reminds me of the Catskills—kinda,” he remarked.

“Yeah, me, too,” Krista added as she pressed the back of her hand to the window pane, complete with a clink from the tiny silver ring on her spindly index finger. “Joey and I have been needin' a li'l art in our lives.”

“The two of you are gonna like the room I got you, too,” Jill announced as the signs for the village emerged into her view.

“Thank you for that, by the way,” he told her with a clearing of his throat. “I wouldn't know where that sort of thing would be in a li'l rural place like this, if I'm honest.”

“Just gotta know where to look, babe,” Krista assured him with a lopsided grin herself.

“I tried ta look, though,” he quipped in a small voice.

“Nah, I did the lookin'—”

Jill nibbled on her bottom lip again from their cuteness and from Joey's transcending his own age with his open collar. Each adjustment of her fingers on the rim of the steering wheel only made her beckon for a breath of fresh air: she wanted to stay in that car forever, but she had an itch she couldn't seem to scratch.

They reached the bed and breakfast, which used to be a hospital back around the first World War before it was converted to an apartment building and then the intimate, warm lit entity it had become right then for the three of them. The dark wooden walls and golden lanterns near the ceiling, all which made up the front room, gave it that finishing touch of life in the woods of California.

Elizabeth, who had tied her hair into a loose ponytail behind her head and put on a soft pink sweatshirt, stood on the side of the front room with her face rosy with good health. Her face lit up at the sight of Jill, Joey, and Krista as they made their way towards her. Elizabeth brought that urn, which had tucked underneath her arm, towards her chest as if it were her journal.

“Joey, Krista—this is my best friend Elizabeth,” Jill introduced them.

“I've heard a lot about you both,” Elizabeth confessed as she adjusted the urn in her arms.

“What'cha got here?” asked Joey as he gestured to the urn.

“My sister is in here,” she told him. Krista gasped and he brought a hand to his chest.

“Oh, man.”

“It's okay, you didn't know,” Elizabeth assured him. “She died a couple of years ago—diabetes.”

“Oh, my God, that's awful,” Krista declared.

“Not to change the subject so hastily, but where's Ellen?” asked Jill.

“The back room here—” Elizabeth gestured to the corridor behind her, where Ellen stood across from a strange woman to converse about something. Jill turned back to Joey and Krista.

“I'll be right back,” she told them.

“Okay! We're gonna check in,” Krista quipped back with that infectious smile.

“All I know is your room is near the back across the hall from the old library,” Jill recalled.

“By the way, that hat is so badass,” said Joey.

“What, my beret?” Jill felt her face bloom with warmth.

“Yeah—totally the artist look. Wouldn't you agree, Krista?”

“Without question,” she replied with a twinkle in her eye.

Jill skirted past her friend to meet up with Ellen, who's face lit up upon sight of her.

“There you are!” She turned to the short woman before her. She was gaunt but shapely, and dressed in a soft looking red wine colored shawl and short white dress; to match her dress, she wore a necklace of pure white pearls. The skin on her legs resembled to the legs of a supermodel with their slender build and slight kiss of the sun. Perhaps it was merely the intimate lighting in there but Jill swore that the skin on her legs changed colors like the fur of a black cat.

“This is Seignora Marcia Ciccia,” Ellen introduced her, “our mentor, and the one who wanted us to perform this play.”

“It's an honor,” Seignora greeted her with a warm smile: she spoke with a slight lingering of an Italian accent, like someone who had lived in an English speaking country most of her life. although Jill knew she was quite educated. She did wonder how long she had been in the country given the smoothness and flawless quality of the skin on her face and neck. Krista, who was as old as Joey, held onto her looks quite well, but even she had the slight sag associated with age; Seignora's skin resembled to fresh glazed clay.

“I hear you are an artist,” she confessed to Jill.

“Kinda,” she replied; she peered over her shoulder to find Joey sitting at one of the low tables there in the front room with the urn before him. Elizabeth must have been standing out of sight. Jill spotted a narrow silvery barrel right next to the fireplace irons and the heavy stone fireplace, right behind him. The room was empty so she could hear Elizabeth's voice, but not the words of which she said to him.

“Perhaps for the next play we can arrange for something—you know, to have you make some kind of art for the set.”

“Oh, yeah!” Ellen recalled. “Like art direction for the stage setting. That is, if you wanna.”

“It's outside of my comfort zone, but I'd be down for it if business slows up,” Jill promised them.

“Cool!” Ellen declared with a throwing of her arms around her.

“Anyways, Ellen,” Seignora started, “—we should get ready. Rehearsal starts in about an hour and a half and we still haven't had lunch yet!”

“Actually I have,” she insisted.

“But I haven't, though… and you know me. It's hard for me to pick out what I want, even after living here in California as long as I have.”

“How long have you lived here?” asked Jill.

“Long enough to call myself a citizen,” she replied to which she flashed her a wink. Ellen then turned back to Jill.

“I'll catch you later.”

“Oh, yeah! Sure, sure—I'll be hangin' with the two birds straight out of New York for the time being.”

“And yes, they are getting the star treatment later on,” Ellen assured her; she passed her to fetch Elizabeth. It was that moment Jill knew that weekend would be majestic.

* * * * *

“I can't believe a li'l place like this out in the wilderness would prove to be a good setting,” Joey was saying as he and Krista nestled down in their comfy chairs together underneath the heavy Indian blankets Jill had brought along with her. They had been seated about ten feet from the stage, which had been set up right outside of the village and near a long low out building made of stone. Ellen had told Jill that was their dressing room.

“How would you know? We haven't even seen the play yet!” Jill proclaimed as she snuggled down to his left.

“I'm more perceptive than I look, y'know,” he teased her, to which Krista giggled.

Night had fallen over the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and Jill felt the marine layer returning to the Valley behind them. Even though she gazed up at the inky black sky and the crisp oak trees, she couldn't help but imagine snow falling all around them. She yearned for three big mugs of hot chocolate, one for the each of them, and each one with those little marshmallows floating near the top. Joey brought the blanket on the bottom up to his ears and hunched his shoulders: a few stray tendrils of his jet black hair brushed against the side of Jill's face to where it tickled.

“Skinny New York boy's cold,” Jill remarked as she tucked the edge of the blanket underneath her hip.

“Freezin'... I gotta hand it to ya, Jill—you're tough.”

“As tough as you, though,” Krista pointed out, to which he shrugged.

“I dunno 'bout that. I've had my ass handed to me time an' time again—and I know you have, too, sure, but I got nuthin' like her, though. Survived two horrific fires and then some.”

The lights before them dimmed and the audience behind them fell silent.

The urn had been made as a centerpiece of the set: the play itself was about a young woman, played by Elizabeth, who had lost her parents in a fire and had grown reticent to even so much as say the words “fire” or “parents” for that matter. Ellen played her stepsister, who was blind and along with her husband, encouraged her to continue her passion for blacksmithing alongside her fiance, a carpenter. The play came to a head when they discovered the fiance had started the fire and lied about it as well as his affair the whole entire time. Joey and Krista giggled like two best friends at the sheer amount of swear words peppered throughout the script. Jill meanwhile kept her eyes fixated on the urn in the backdrop and she knew Elise was smiling down on her sisters at the moment Ellen said, “I know what you've been up to” to Elizabeth's character's fiance. Even with his getting caught and his eventual shunning and disposal, both sisters knew their parents were not returning.

About five minutes from the ending, Jill caught the sound of rustling off in the bushes to their right. A cool, crisp breeze brushed over their heads and in turn sent a shiver down their spines. The first snow of the season was not too far off as Elizabeth turned to the urn on the backdrop and rested her hand on the side.

“I will always love you,” she whispered, which beckoned a sniffle out of Krista. Jill felt Joey lean over to put his arm around her; Jill herself felt tears well up in her eyes. Joey put his other arm around her and held both women close to him. The lights faded out to darkness and the applause beckoned forth; Jill raised her hands over her head like she did at the Anthrax concert. Seignora emerged from the darkness to tell everyone that it was merely the first act of two, the next act of which came on Saturday night.

“Amazing,” Joey remarked as he leaned forward. He glanced back at Jill with a grin on his face. “The whole weekend!”

“Beautiful,” Krista said. “Just beautiful. And addictive!”

Ellen and Elizabeth emerged from behind the set to meet up with them.

“Hey, the stars have fallen to the earth,” Joey proclaimed, which made them both laugh out loud.

“Seignora wants to speak to you, Jill,” Ellen told her.

“What does she want to speak me about?”

“Making a set for a future play, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, that's right!”

“Should we thank Seignora—what'd you say her name was?” asked Krista.

“Marcia!” Elizabeth answered as she tucked the urn underneath her arm.

“Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” Joey cracked which made them erupt into laughter again.

“We'll help you guys pick up the chairs and blankets,” Ellen told them as the three of them stood to their feet and were greeted by the onslaught of stone cold mountain breeze surrounding them.

“Let's make this quick,” said Jill as she hunched her shoulders up towards her ears.

“She's in that little out building over here,” Elizabeth informed them. Joey thanked her and the three of them scurried across the grass and around the side of the stage; the stone building in question loomed behind the makeshift stage in shadow, but they were greeted by that warm glow of lamp light in the front windows. Jill led the way into the short front corridor, past a low wooden stool which she could only assume was for monologues, given all the times she watched Elizabeth and Ellen do something solo.

“Seignora?” she called out.

“In here.” Her voice sounded weak and gravelly, as if she was developing a dry cough of sorts. Joey backed off a bit.

“What's wrong, babe?” Krista asked him, but Jill kept going into the dressing room. Seignora sat on the sofa with a tissue to her face. In front of her stood what appeared to be a sewing kit.

“Are you feeling okay?” she asked her.

“I think I am getting ill, so I will make this quick.”

“Six feet, Jill,” Krista advised her, to which Joey lingered back in the hallway.

“Always,” she vowed. Jill returned to Seignora as she bowed her head and breathed heavy.

“Should we do this over the phone or—?”

“No,” Seignora insisted with haste. “No, no, no, no—”

Something in the corridor broke, like broken glass.

“Shit!” Joey blurted out.

“Joey!” Jill shrieked.

“Jill!” he echoed.

“What was that?” Seignora demanded.

“I knocked over a vase—I didn't even see it, though, I swear,” Joey babbled.

“You—You—” Seignora sputtered. Even in the warm welcoming light of the dressing room, Jill watched her face turn pale and sickly. Her cheeks sunk into her face, and in turn revealed the bones underneath the otherwise thick flesh. She groped forward as if to hold onto something, but she was too far from the vanity mirror and the accompanying chair.

“Seignora?” Jill backed up to the door, where Joey and Krista had congregated to ensure all was alright. She staggered forward so as to catch her balance.

“I want to be an animal,” her voice lowered to a deep guttural growl.

“The—The fuck?” Joey stammered. Krista's eyes widened. Jill stood back with them as Seignora fell to her knees on the floor; she gasped for air as if that hoary old virus had ravaged her body, but there was no way it could have been it. Jill glanced at the shards of porcelain in Joey's hands.

“Put it back!”

“Put it back, Joey!” Krista added.

“Fuck!” he blurted out as he chucked the pieces towards the door.

But it was pointless as Seignora clutched at herself and her skin darkened from the loss of precious oxygen. Her fingers twisted and gnarled like old uprooted tree branches; Jill noticed them losing their flesh and blood all at once as both transformed into thick powder. The bones underneath the skin revealed to be pointed, made feral like the claws of a creature. The three of them backed away from there to the front corridor and to the front door.

“I am hungry,” she moaned. “I need it—I need flesh for my flesh! Where are my clothes!” She shook her arms about, and so hard such that patches of skin and dried dead flesh fell off like a snake shedding its skin.

“Shit!” Krista shouted and she ran to the door. Joey followed her, but Jill lingered back.

“Come on, Jill!” Joey called out, and Seignora's rotting body lunged out of the room. The warm light was enough for Jill to watch her skin fall off of her bones as if it had rotted. Joey yanked on her arm to keep her out of the way. Jill huddled behind him and next to a mortified Krista.

“If she wants flesh, she's gonna haveta go through the skinny man first,” he promised them as Seignora's teeth decayed into bright yellow and then brown, and then jet black before they fell right out of her skull. Krista set a hand on his shoulder and put her arm around his upper back: her other hand touched Jill's shoulder so as to comfort her.

Seignora clawed at the walls like the violent wild animal she so wanted to be. Her skin withered and rotted away, and revealed to them a thick coarse web of pitch dark veins akin to a leper: Joey stood there with his arms over Krista and Jill's chests, thus protecting them both from the creature before them. Both women huddled behind his slender but strong body.

They watched her hair slither off of her skull as if from sickness. Her eyes bugged out of their sockets, although they were as clear and white as the albumin in an egg.

“I'm old—I'm dying—I need—I need more!”

The flesh and blood she had borrowed over the years withered and faded away into nothing more than tired tendrils and a disgusting pile of regret. Regret for not having taken the cloak of the Grim Reaper herself when the time came.

“Should we run?” Krista's voice trembled. Joey's lip quivered and his body froze as if he had sustained rigor mortis.

“Joey!” Jill cried.

“JOEY!” Krista shouted into his ear.

“JESUS FUCKING CHRIST!” Joey shrieked like he would on stage. Krista reached for the stool and hurled it into the corridor so as to act as a barrier. The three of them ran out of the out building and into the darkness. Jill led them both to the front of the stage, where they met up with Elizabeth and Ellen right as they were about to fetch them.

“Hey! Hey, whoa, is everything alright?” asked the latter.

“We gotta go! We gotta go!” Jill proclaimed. “Seignora! Very bad things!” She could scarcely speak given the adrenaline. Confused, Elizabeth and Ellen followed them back to their cars and back to the bed and breakfast. Jill, Joey, and Krista, all of whom were alone by the time they reached their rooms at the back of the building, congregated in that hallway so as to catch their breath.

“What the fuck was that?” Joey demanded, his brown eyes wide and his expression twisted with terror.

“I wish I knew,” Jill confessed as she ran her fingers through her hair. “I know it's the least of our problems at the moment, but I hope Elizabeth and Ellen got my blankets in the back of their car.” Her eyes wandered over to the doorway to her right: it didn't belong to a room so to speak, but rather a small library, which had buttoned up for the night. But the little faded red cross next to the door frame was all the more apparent to the three of them. Krista knitted her eyebrows together; the hallway was silent save for the low chatter in the front room.

“What'd you say her name was?” she asked Jill.

“Marcia Ciccia. She also told me she was a citizen of California.”

“Marcia Ciccia...” she echoed in a near whisper. Jill and Joey watched her reach underneath her hair for a bobby pin which kept the hair off of her neck. She then stuck the pin into the keyhole, to which it unlocked. The door swung open to reveal the pitch darkness inside.

“Who says you can't be girly and badass?” Joey declared; Krista switched on the light and they stepped inside of the small, cramped library. A long low white cabinet stood on the right side of the room before a closet door.

“I'm sure records will be over here,” she pointed out as she made her way to the cabinet. “Records usually are in cabinets of sorts—given behind us there are nothing but books.” Joey meanwhile peered over his shoulder to make sure no one was coming. Krista knelt down before the cabinet door closest to them and used the same bobby pin to unlock it. Indeed, once Jill and Joey joined her on the floor, and she unveiled the section beginning with the letter “C”, they were met with over a dozen medical records.

“Ciccia,” Krista muttered.

“Right there!” Jill took out the folder first and opened it to reveal the medical records.

“Marcia Ciccia was an Italian immigrant—profession, a seamstress—born in—1906!” Krista gaped at her. “—it says here she was a few lines away from Bellardini.”

Joey raised his eyebrows at that.

“Bellardini,” he muttered.

“Bellardini—wonder if she knew your grandparents,” she suggested before returning to the article. Her eyes wandered down the column and she frowned at the markings underneath Seignora's name. “Wait a minute, this is a death certificate. It says here she died in the Griffith Park Fire of 1933—down in LA. This is her death certificate!”

“Wait a minute, but she was alive, though,” Krista pointed out.

“Yeah, she was alive and her skin looked radiant, as if her heart was in fact beating. She also gasped as if she was having trouble breathing.”

Jill picked up another piece of paper from the folder, which declared Seignora had died in October of that year from third degree burns and a choking on smoke. She then returned to the record in her other hand. “This considerable fire down south back during the Depression that killed like a hundred people—she was one of the victims, like her house was near the park. And she got caught up in a back fire and it killed her. Until the Camp Fire happened, it was the deadliest fire in California history. Twenty nine people.”

“And she was a casualty,” Joey said in a soft voice.

“Or so they believed,” said Krista as she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear.

“She survived it, though,” Jill pointed out. “She survived with those horrific third degree burns all over her body. Her body was broken but her soul kept going inside of her. It was—” Every time she blinked, she could picture Seignora lunging for them with the phalanges on her hands as sharp as razors to steal their flesh from them. She shook her head about. “—like the fire had made her super human. Like she clung to dear life and something kept her alive.”

“Maybe it was her will to live,” Krista suggested. “She wanted to be alive.”

“She stopped at nothing, too—” Jill flashed back on the sewing kit in the dressing room. “She was willing to do whatever it took, too. She wanted our flesh because she wanted to live.”

“And she was only twenty seven on top of it, too,” Joey added.

“Twenty seven—died young,” said Jill. “And she looked young, too. She looked young but it was all a disguise of her true age, though.”

“So we were dealin' with a hundred year old entity there,” Joey concluded as he swallowed down his nervousness.

“Looks to be,” Jill answered as she put the papers back into the folder. “Twenty seven when the fire happened, but she kept going for decades on end. Took people's flesh and blood and then buried their bones.”

“No bones about it...” Joey's voice trailed off, and Krista raised her head.

There was a gunshot down the hallway and the three of them gaped at each other.

“What the hell was that,” Krista's voice quivered.

“Put it back! Put it back!” Joey hissed. “Ya told me to put it back, now I'm tellin' ya to put it back!” Jill closed the folder and stuffed it back into the box; Krista put the box back into the cabinet and shut the door. The three of them scrambled to the door and back into the hallway, just time to find a shotgun blast right to Seignora's head at the far end. Jill stifled a scream with her hands, while Joey huddled behind her with his hands clasped onto her hips. Krista turned off the light and shut the door behind her. Seignora fell to the floor, flat on her back. A beautiful woman having rotted away and then suffered a violent gun blast to the head courtesy of Elizabeth. She stood in the doorway with the shotgun barrel pointed to the floor; even from a distance, Jill could make out the sight of the smoldering at the end. Breathing heavy, she raised her head to the three of them at the far end of the corridor.

“You guys alright?” she called.

“Yeah,” Jill replied as Joey put his arm around her and Krista, the latter of whom buried her face in his chest. Elizabeth and Ellen passed Seignora's smoldering corpse to talk to them and for one of the patrons to call the medics.

“She's a fucking zombie, man!” Ellen yelped with tears in her eyes. “A zombie!”

“She was wantin' to take our skin, though,” Joey pointed out. “Not our brains.”

“Or maybe,” Krista suggedted, “—'cause she asked 'where are my clothes?' and she shook her arms about. She was looking for new skin to comprise herself with.”

“Shook her arms an' a bunch'a skin tickets came flyin' off...” Joey shuddered.

“Skinlings,” Jill quipped.

“Somebody who was still alive and wanted it to stay that way,” Krista added.

“My God,” Ellen whispered as she handed Elizabeth the urn, and she tucked it underneath her arm. The five of them stayed there at the end of the hallway until the medics showed up to take the smoldering corpse away to the morgue. Seignora was perhaps going to end up in a fire regardless of what she wanted after the Griffith Park Fire anyway.

And even though it was almost midnight at that point, Elizabeth offered them a cup of late night coffee before bed. They congregated around the table of which Joey had taken his seat at before. Ellen lay Seignora's pearl necklace on the hearth before she sat down: the pearls were still intact despite having sustained not one, but two shotgun blasts.

“What I want to know is how in the world—would she remove someone's flesh and blood and not make a huge fucking mess?” Ellen almost gagged at the thought.

“Her medical record said she was a seamstress,” Joey recalled. Jill noticed his stomach cave in and his feet shuffle underneath the table. And then she gasped as the memory of Elise's burial returned to mind. Those last moments she saw her best friend's corpse before it vanished into the flames, she recalled a huge gash on her belly, which they all assumed came from the tumor, and yet it was too perfect. Too manufactured.

“What?” Elizabeth raised her eyes at her.

“She killed Elise,” Jill concluded. “She killed Elise to take her flesh—but wait a minute.” She turned to Elizabeth. “—Elise had cancer brought on by diabetes.”

“Yeah. But we thought it was that that killed her. We couldn't imagine somebody—much less Seignora—killing her, though.”

“And Elise still had her skin, too,” Ellen recalled.

“She was diabetic—and Seignora's skin was perfect. So she probably killed Elise and found out that it was the skin of a diabetic.”

“So what now?” Krista asked them, right as the waitress strode up to them with five white mugs of black coffee and an accompanying karafe of cream and some sugar packets.

Joey raised his mug to the warm intimate light. Jill noticed his brown eyes wandering over to the hearth and the string of white pearls laying there on top of the bricks.

“To Elise and Seignora,” he said in a low voice.

“Elise and Seignora,” the four women echoed all in unison. For a split second, Jill swore she saw Seignora's face appear in the warm light, but she knew it was the adrenaline waning off as she took a sip of that rich fresh coffee. That next act of the play would be even more cathartic given Seignora's absence, a heavy absence following someone who just wanted to live and stopped at nothing to find it for herself.


End file.
